Far from Home: Three Noirs by Jacques Tourneur

The very first shot in Out of the Past is of a signpost with arrows listing the distances to various destinations; the camera then places us in an open-top convertible, behind a driver in a black overcoat and fedora, as he motors into a small town in the Sierra Nevadas. A few scenes later, Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has the above exchange with his girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), as they laze beside a pristine lake under towering peaks. Jeff imagines settling down with Ann in a lakeside cabin and never leaving, but this fantasy is as fleeting as the light scattering over the water.

Out of the Past never stays in one location for long. Jeff drifts from place to place like a sleeper through a series of fitful dreams. The film opens in Bridgeport, a tiny outpost in the mountains with a gas station and a diner, a few stark houses, and a white clapboard church shining like bone in the hard winter sun. In flashbacks, as Jeff tells Ann about his former life as a private detective and how he was hired to find a rich gambler’s runaway mistress, we travel to New York—a penthouse apartment, a smoky Harlem jazz club, a city without daylight—and to Acapulco, where Jeff found the missing woman, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). Then on to Lake Tahoe, where a serene view of crystalline waters is the spoils of the gambler’s dirty deals, and to San Francisco, where boogie-woogie piano plays in dim-lit apartments and doomed men mix martinis on terraces with views of headlights crawling across the Bay Bridge.

Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was one of the supreme masters of noir lighting, as he established in the deliriously expressionist Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Here, the Ansel Adams–like panoramas that open the film shrink down to shots of Jeff and Ann meeting in the swamps at night, their bodies caught in a web of shadows from bare, jagged branches. A simple walk down a hall is transformed into nearly abstract, rhythmic patterns of dark and light. In his superb study Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, Chris Fujiwara cites an early childhood memory that seems a perfect rosebud for the director’s use of chiaroscuro lighting: on Christmas Eve his parents put his presents in a large, spooky room that he had to approach via a pitch-black hallway, where he struggled between desire and fear, the darkness of the passage and the distant brightness of the gifts that took on “a phantom-like appearance.”

In the long central flashback narrated by Jeff, a kind of film-within-a-film, Kathie is repeatedly associated with light and shadow—he describes her walking in “out of the sun” or “out of the moonlight” or “in the headlights”—as if she were a creature of pure celluloid. Kathie is the deadliest of all femmes fatales because she is the most enchanting, and her romance with Jeff is magical, far from the usual spectacle of a temptress reeling in a chump. True, their first kiss is enmeshed in black fishing nets on a beach (one of a series of marine references, along with a bar called La Mar Azul—the Blue Sea—characters named Fisher and Eels, and a hoodlum who is yanked to his death by a fishing line). But Jeff knows, at least on some level, that he is throwing his life away as he falls into Kathie’s embrace, murmuring, “Baby, I don’t care.” Their Mexican idyll—a rhapsody of sunstruck plazas and dim cantinas, moonlit beaches and rainswept bungalows—floats in the unreality of being in a foreign land. “I don’t know what we were waiting for,” Jeff muses. “Maybe we thought the world would end. Maybe we thought it was all a dream.”

Kathie is different in each place where she appears, connecting the film’s peripatetic structure with its themes of disillusionment and betrayal. In Mexico she is girlish, laughing, luminous in white. In Tahoe, she looks pinched and wary; in San Francisco she is ravishing in an off-the-shoulder black gown and upswept hair, but the fear and desperate lies are visible just under the glistening surface of her beauty. At the end, she is severe in a grey tailored suit and wimple-like head covering, gloating that she is finally running the show. Out of the Past’s plot is famously convoluted, filled with doubles and double-crosses—during the filming, Mitchum cracked to Jane Greer, “Don’t tell anyone, but I think they lost three pages in mimeo.” But everything flows like music. The consistent sound of the dialogue—every line a wisecrack, an aphorism, or a morsel of pulp poetry—is all the more remarkable given that the script, though solely credited to Daniel Mainwaring, had uncredited contributions by James M. Cain and Frank Fenton—the latter contributing many of the best lines.

That sound is, above all, Robert Mitchum’s: the whole film is keyed to his rhythm, pacing, and lyricism, his way of delivering his lines behind the beat. He was the perfect actor for Tourneur, who routinely instructed performers to speak more softly and underplay. In Out of the Past, this subdued quality combines with intense stylization to create something effortlessly sublime. Received on its release as just another hard-boiled detective story, it has come to be revered as, arguably, the definitive film noir. The whole movie sustains a laid-back high, like a wee-hours jam session, as if the whole thing were dreamed some winter night in “a little joint on Fifty-Sixth Street.”

But in the end, no amount of wit and grace can undo the consequences of a fatal mistake. The world doesn’t end, just the dream. As Jeff tells Kathie, “There’s no place left to go.”

Much later, in the snowy outback of Wyoming, John (Brian Keith), one of the robbers, explains that with his share of the stolen money he plans to buy a boat and sail away to find his own island, where he will live the rest of his life in peace. It is the same dream Jeff Bailey indulged in, of settling down in a cabin by a lake: a place where the past will never find him. The odd-couple pairing of the cerebral, slightly squeamish John and the sniggering, sadistic Red (Rudy Bond), whose partner describes him as “a kind of adult delinquent,” is one of the film’s best features. Their contempt for each other is a ticking time bomb.

Nightfall reverses the trajectory of Out of the Past, not only opening in the city and then moving to the wilderness but beginning as pure noir and gradually lightening in tone, from a scene of torture in an oil field at night to a comically disrupted fashion show. It is ultimately a story about luck, bad and good, more than guilt or fate.

The best scene comes near the beginning, when Jim meets Marie by chance in a chic bar, where she strikes up a conversation by claiming to have forgotten her wallet and asking to borrow five dollars. Is she on the level, or setting him up for a betrayal? Their banter is a cocktail of wariness and weariness, cynicism with a dash of hope. “You’ve told me so little about yourself, you might be any one of several people,” Marie says to Jim—who has indeed been several people. The scene is pure Tourneur because it is awash in the uncertain atmosphere of twilight. It is all seductive ambiguity, veiled hints of risk and possibility. This is the best time: when light merges into dark and desire into fear, when the evening might go anywhere.